Welcome to Research in Michigan, your weekly look at what Michigan professors and researchers are doing, as well as what experts from the state are saying in national articles and publications.

In this first installment, we look at the sociology of a college dorm to one professor's search for a better way to detect weapons in a large crowd.

— Mean Girls? A University of Michigan professor studied a group of young women who started college on the same floor for five years, finding that "the high school peer culture that divides students into homecoming queens, wannabes and nerds thrives in college, to the disadvantage of many."

Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, followed 53 women over five years, from moving into their dorm to going to a Greek party, according to a U-M press release.

"Parents and college administrators are naively optimistic about the atmosphere for freshman women in large party dorms," Armstrong said. "The pressures these young women encounter make it very difficult for them to focus on academics. For many, the experience is not a good one, and we found that it can affect the trajectories of their lives for many years to come."

— "The Shining" On Friday, the documentary "Room 237" was released, detailing several theories behind Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film "The Shining."

David Segal writes in the New York Times: "One believes the film is about the slaughter of American Indians, another that it is about the Holocaust. Yet another claims it is a kind of apology by Kubrick for the putative role he played in helping to fake the moon landing. And there’s more."

Geoffrey Cocks, a professor of history at Albion College, was one of the voices in the film. Cocks said that "Kubrick wanted to link the fictional horror in 'The Shining' with the real-world horror of the Nazi concentration camps" and the Holocaust, according to the Times.

— Long range weapons detection? A U-M professor is looking at a new way to detect weapons on people in crowded places. Kamal Sarabandi specializes in remote sensing and worked for the Department of Defense on a millimeter-wave radar system. The technology is used today in cars to avoid collisions and military technology to

After the Newtown school shooting, he wondered if it could be used to detect weapons on people from a distance.

"Sarabandi paired it with Doppler radar signal processing to pick out the signature of a person walking in the noisy radar scene," according to the U of M article. "Then he uses a technique called radar polarimetry to essentially squint at the signal coming from the pedestrian's torso and identify the telltale glare that a metal object hidden there would cause."